Trump campaign contact admits to Kremlin ties

The lawyer who met with President Trump's oldest son and other top Trump campaign officials is now admitting that she is a Russian informant. During an interview to be broadcast Friday by NBC News, she acknowledged that she was not merely a private lawyer but a source of information for a top Kremlin official, Yuri Y. Chaika, the prosecutor general.

Ms. Veselnitskaya also appears to have recanted her earlier denials of Russian government ties.

All these circumstances and denials cast Veselnitskaya as a woman willing to help her country in any way, even if it is to the detriment of the USA government.

Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was a Russian government informant when she met with Trump campaign officials at Trump Tower in 2016, she admitted in an interview with NBC News slated to air Friday.

Newly released e-mails from a Russian lawyer involved in a USA money-laundering case showed the lawyer had close contact with officials from the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office, even as she portrayed herself as a private citizen. "Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general", according to Newsweek.

Dossier is an arm of exiled tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the onetime oil billionaire who spent a decade in prison on fraud and tax-evasion convictions that were widely seen as retaliation for his political ambitions and opposition to Vladimir Putin.

The Dossier organization said Friday it had been sent a series of emails showing Veselnitskaya set out strategies for the Kremlin's response to a US request for assistance in a money-laundering case involving her client.

She told the Russian news agency Interfax this week that her email account was hacked this year.

She said in a letter to a U.S. Senate committee past year that she "operate [s] independently of any government bodies".

The meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 is being looked into by special counsel Robert Mueller as he probes whether there was any collusion between members of the Trump campaign and Russian Federation.

But the e-mails, which were provided to RFE/RL, show her communicating with Sergei Bochkaryov, a top official in the office of Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika, about an official government response to a USA legal request. Now living outside of Russian Federation, he is a vocal critic of the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin. The dossier contains numerous allegations of Russian ties to Donald Trump, his associates and the Trump campaign.

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